The Wind in His Heart

by Charles de Lint

  The woman nods. “I will hold you to that,” she says. I could swear the ghost raven on her shoulders flutters its wings and grins at me.

  I see Morago roll his eyes. Calico gives a heavy sigh.

  The woman turns to Morago before I can clarify what I meant.

  More and more cars and pickups are pulling in along the side of the road. I see a lot of familiar faces, many of them in traditional garb.

  “Ohla, Ramon Morago,” the woman says.

  “Ohla, señora,” the shaman responds. “It’s unfortunate that we meet under such sorrowful circumstances.”

  The woman shrugs. “There is no need for sorrow. Life and death are only different positions on the wheel.”

  “Of course,” Morago says. “Which is why we are here to celebrate our friend’s life. Will you join us?”

  The woman steps aside and makes a motion with her arm to usher us into the canyon. Morago walks past the woman and her dog, followed by Calico. When the woman falls into step behind them, Reuben, Thomas and the other recently arrived tribal members join them in groups of three and four.

  I step back, out of the way.

  I feel a tug on my sleeve. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  I turn and smile at Aggie. “I’m not really here.”

  Her eyebrows go up.

  “I mean, I’m not going into the canyon.” I look past her. “Where’s Sadie?”

  “Still asleep, I imagine. She’s a bit of a trial, that girl.”

  I nod. “Yeah, and it could get messy. Apparently her father showed up at the community center with a deputy from the sheriff’s department, claiming that he’d seen her kidnapped by an Indian driving a white van.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, it’s complete crap. Morago says even Jerry Five Hawks didn’t buy it. But there’s still going to be an investigation. It’s too serious an accusation for there not to be.”

  Aggie shakes her head. “Why would he abandon his daughter in the desert and then come to the rez with a story like that?”

  “Beats me. But I’m going to go collect her before the police start knocking on doors. I don’t want you messed up in this.”

  “And you’ll do what with her?”

  “Take her back to my place—at least for now. Unless the police can see into the otherworld, they’ll never find her there.”

  Aggie puts a hand on my arm. “Don’t do that. There’s something off about this whole situation. Just wait until the ceremony is finished and we’ll put our heads together with Morago and figure something out.”

  I hesitate. I hate the idea of Aggie getting in trouble because I decided to play Good Samaritan, but she’s right. There is something off about all of this. We need to think it through and play it smart.

  “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll wait for the two of you at your fire pit.”

  Her eyes crinkle and she squeezes my arm. “What do you know? It turns out you can take advice.”

  I let her have her moment.

  “I won’t be more than a couple of hours,” she says.

  I nod. “Long enough to catch a snooze,” I say.

  “Hey, how’d you even find out about this ceremony?” I ask.

  “I had a crow come knocking on my window a half hour ago.”

  Here’s how far gone I am after the past couple of days: I don’t even roll my eyes.

  “You should get going,” I tell her.

  She starts to go, but turns around. “That girl,” she says. “Sadie. She’s pretty messed up and I don’t know that she can be fixed.”

  “Still, we’ve to try, right?”

  “I don’t know that she wants to be fixed.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Maybe. But what if it’s true?”

  She turns away again and this time I watch as she joins the last few stragglers making their way into the canyon.

  The drums start up as I head off down the road, but I hardly hear them. I’m too caught up in thinking about what Aggie had to say—so much so that I don’t realize a car has stopped beside me until Jerry Two Hawks calls to me through its open passenger window. It takes a moment for me to register the tribal police crest on the side of the door and whose voice I heard.

  I lean in the window. “Hey, Jerry.”

  “Ohla,” he says.

  “What brings you out here?”

  “You.”

  That gives me pause.

  “We were asking around on the casino side about the white van,” he says. “You know, the one that the father says was used to grab the girl?”

  “I heard about it.”

  “We’ve got another witness besides the father. Says you were driving the van, and it was Reuben who grabbed the girl.”

  “You know that’s bullshit. I don’t have a van, white or any other colour, and neither does Reuben. Check with the DMV.”

  “We already did, but it’s not much of an argument. The van could have been stolen.”

  “Jesus, Jerry. You don’t actually think that Reuben and I would—”

  He cuts me off. “You think I’m an idiot? Of course I don’t. But I still need to take statements from the two of you. It’s talk to me or talk to the sheriff’s department.”

  We both know it’s not an either/or. Reuben and I will be talking to both whether I come with Jerry now or I don’t. Probably the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs as well. A white minor being kidnapped is big news, and they’ll all want a piece of the pie. Everybody wants to be the hero and get the promotion.

  Everybody except for me.

  “Reuben’s in the canyon,” I say.

  Jerry nods. “I’ll talk to him after the ceremony. But maybe we could start with you?”

  If I were Calico, I could just step away into the otherworld and good luck with catching me there. But I’m not and she’s busy. And anyway, this’d all still be waiting for me when I got back.

  I sigh and open the door, slide into the passenger seat.

  “Who’s this second witness?” I ask.

  “Sammy Swift Grass,” Jerry says as we pull away.

  26

  Leah

  Leah couldn’t sleep, so an hour after she’d lain down she was back outside, sitting on a low stone wall behind the motel watching the sun rise. She found herself wishing she’d brought her phone out, but she didn’t want to miss a moment by going back inside to get it. A camera never captured this sort of thing properly anyway, or at least not in her experience. So she stayed where she was, listening to the morning bird chorus as the sky slowly lightened in a blush over the Hierro Maderas Mountains. She could actually see the shadows of the mountains receding, the higher the sun rose.

  When Marisa came around the side of the motel to join her, a half-dozen quail went bobbing into the underbrush, startled by the sound of her footsteps crunching in the dirt. A ground squirrel scolded her before it too scurried from sight. Marisa sat down on the wall beside her.

  “You’re up early,” she said.

  “I couldn’t fall asleep,” Leah told her without turning from the view. “I guess I got enough on the drive down.”

  Marisa nodded. She looked at the sunrise. Lifting her hand, she covered up a yawn.

  “Pretty,” she said.

  Leah nodded. She could think of a hundred glorious descriptions for that sky, but “pretty” worked just fine. When the sun finally popped up above the mountains she felt like applauding.

  “I need coffee,” Marisa said.

  “This guy told me there’s a good diner just down the road.”

  “What guy?”

  “I met him last night when I was sitting at the little table out in front of our room.”

  Marisa turned to look at her. “In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, you meet a guy?”

  “It’s not like that. He was just coming back from work or whatever, and stopped to chat for a few minutes.”

  “Cute?”

  Leah laughed. “More lik
e grizzled. He looked like a real desert rat. But he was nice.”

  “Let me get this straight. Do you make a habit of chatting up strangers you meet in the middle of the night?”

  “He had kind eyes.”

  Marisa shook her head. “I need coffee,” she repeated.

  * * *

  Jerry’s Roadhouse was pretty much what Ernie had promised. It was a long building, part adobe and part wood frame, with a tiled roof and a dirt parking lot. Like the motel, it had seen better days. But the coffee was strong, with a bottomless cup, and the breakfast special was a generous helping of eggs any style, sausages, biscuits and gravy, with freshly squeezed orange juice and a couple of pancakes on the side.

  The main difference from back home was that the waitress brought them each sides of salsa and green chilies. Her name tag read “Janis” and she seemed genuinely happy to see them, unlike the hipster servers and baristas back in Newford, who often seemed slightly put-upon when they actually had to take an order. Janis’s face lit up when Leah told her that Ernie had recommended the place to them.

  “So where did you meet Ernie?” she asked.

  “We’re staying at the Silver Spur,” Leah told her, “and I was sitting outside our room last night when he came in from work or wherever.”

  Janis smiled. “Did he tell you he was working?”

  “No, I just assumed it was work. He didn’t look like a partying kind of guy.”

  “You can say that again. Ernie’s one of the last of the old desert rats. He spends pretty much every night out in the mountains. I think he can see better than a coyote in the dark.”

  “So what does he do?” Marisa asked.

  Janis shrugged and refilled their coffee mugs. “Who knows? Stares at the stars? Makes friends with the javelinas? I expect that mostly, he just wanders around.”

  “What about the migrants who get lost out there?” Leah asked. “He must run into some of them.”

  A wall suddenly went up behind Janis’s eyes. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said and started to move away from the table.

  “It’s just he was talking to me about them,” Leah said. “I’m a writer—a journalist. He told me I should be telling their stories.”

  The waitress paused. “He said that?”

  Leah nodded.

  Janis looked around the restaurant before returning her attention to them. The warmth was back in her eyes. “That’s something that doesn’t get talked a lot about round here,” she said. “It’s like politics or religion. People have their own ideas about the issue and there’s no shifting them. Get on the wrong side of that argument, you could find yourself finishing it from the inside of a jail cell.”

  Leah and Marisa exchanged surprised looks.

  “For real?” Marisa said.

  Somebody at the long counter called for a refill.

  “Hold your horses, Fred,” Janis called to the man. “Be right there.” She turned back to their table. “Ask Ernie if you want to know more about it,” she said in a quiet voice. “It’s not my story to tell.”

  “Well, that wasn’t weird,” Marisa said as the waitress walked away.

  Leah nodded. “Except we live in a whole different world, so we shouldn’t judge.”

  Marisa studied her for a moment. “You’ve got a look in your eye.”

  “It’s just…I’ve been thinking about it ever since I talked to Ernie last night. What am I doing chasing around after the ghost of Jackson Cole when there are real, important stories to tell? Maybe I should be writing something that has more meaning than trying to get inside the head of some spoiled rock star.”

  Marisa laughed.

  “Okay,” Leah said. “So I don’t think Cole was ever exactly that, and if he is still alive and living around here, he’s certainly not that now. But what are the chances he’s actually alive? And if he is, would the world be a better place because I tracked him down and exposed his secret hideaway?”

  “Probably not,” Marisa said. “But really, I can’t answer that and neither can you. It might mean a lot to his fans.”

  “But if he’s alive, he walked away. Who are we to drag him back into the limelight?”

  Marisa shrugged. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s see what this Abigail White Horse has to tell us. It might not be a decision we ever need to make.”

  Leah looked at the old Coke clock behind the lunch counter.

  “It’s pretty early to drop in on her,” she said.

  “Probably. But we can do a drive by, make sure we can actually find the place. If it looks like nobody’s up, we’ll just kick our heels for a while.”

  “I suppose it’s a plan,” Leah said.

  She finished her coffee and they took their check to the cash.

  “So what are you girls up to today?” Janis asked as she rang them in.

  “We’re driving up to the rez,” Leah told her. “We’re hoping to interview an artist named Abigail White Horse.”

  Janis nodded. “She’s a nice lady. Her paintings give me the creeps, but her, I like.”

  “You know her?”

  “Not really. But Ernie takes me to the powwow every summer and I’ve met her there. Too bad you girls didn’t come a few months earlier. The Kikimi know how to throw a party. Even Ernie cuts loose a little.”

  “We’ll try to make it back sometime,” Marisa said. She paid the bill over Leah’s protest and asked for a receipt. “It’s a business expense,” she told Leah.

  “You have fun today,” Janis said as she made change and printed out a receipt. “And make sure you bring water.”

  “We’re only going to the rez. It doesn’t look that far on the map.”

  “It’s not. But like Ernie says, the first rule of going into the desert—doesn’t matter for how long—is to bring plenty of water.”

  “We will,” Leah said.

  * * *

  After leaving Jerry’s Roadhouse, they backtracked a few blocks into town until they found a gas station where they could top up the gas tank and buy some bottled water. Leah entered Abigail White Horse’s address into the GPS on her phone while she waited for Marisa to come back to the car with the water.

  “Ready to navigate?” Marisa asked as she slipped into the driver’s seat.

  Leah nodded. “Left out of here, then take your first right on Jacinto. It’ll eventually take us all the way to the rez.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Looks like it might get a bit tricky after that.”

  Marisa smiled. “Which is why I have you.”

  Once they got out of town, Leah drank in the austere landscape, appreciating every subtlety of faded colour. She loved how the shape of the land wasn’t hidden by swaths of trees the way it was in the hills back home. Instead, she could see every nuance as the spartan panorama spread away from the highway, rolling into the distance like the dry waves of a dusty sea.

  When she said as much, Marisa shot her a quick glance before returning her attention to the highway. “You’re not serious, are you?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Leah asked.

  “They call these ‘badlands’ for a reason. There’s nothing but sand and cacti. I don’t know how anybody can live out here.”

  “I think it’s beautiful.”

  Marisa laughed. “And you also think there hasn’t been any good music since the Diesel Rats packed it in.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Marisa laughed again. “Kidding.”

  They passed a sign announcing that they were entering the Kikimi Painted Lands, quickly followed by a place called the Little Tree Trading Post. The dirt parking lot was empty, but it was still early in the morning, so it was probably closed. Leah hoped they’d get a chance to stop in on the way back. She checked her phone.

  “We make a left in another mile or so,” she said.

  They missed the turn, but since they were the only car on the road, Marisa just backed up. The GPS led them through reddish hills dotte
d with mesquite, cacti and dried brush until they topped a rise to see a rutted lane that led down to a pair of adobe buildings, one obviously the main house, with a smaller structure up on the side of the hill behind it.

  “That’s it,” Leah said. She peered through the windshield. “Although how are we supposed to figure out if anybody’s up?”

  Marisa pointed to a figure sitting on the porch at the front of the main house. “Somebody’s up,” she said.

  She steered the rental down the lane, stopping where it opened into a yard between the two buildings. A half-dozen dogs came running and barking to meet them and Leah shrank back in the car seat. They looked like a mix of German Shepherd, coyote and pit bull, their fur the same dusty colours of the landscape—muted reds, yellows and tans—and all she could think of was the time a neighbour’s two dogs had chased Aimee and her across a park when they were kids. She’d been nervous around dogs ever since.

  The figure on the porch proved to be an old Native woman. She watched their approach, but made no move to rise and meet them.

  Leah caught Marisa’s arm as she started to open her door. “You’re not going out there, are you?”

  “Kind of hard to have a conversation with that woman if we stay in the car.”

  “But the dogs—”

  “I’m not scared of dogs,” Marisa told her as she opened her door.

  The pack crowded around her as she got out, but she ignored them until she’d closed the door and was able to step away from the car. Then she stood still with her hands open on either side of her thighs to let the dogs take in her scent.

  Leah looked up to where the woman had been sitting to find that she’d stood up and was coming to meet them. Swallowing her fear, Leah got out and braced herself as the dogs left off pushing their muzzles against Marisa’s legs to take a turn at crowding around her instead.

  “Ohla,” the woman said. “Are you lost?”

  “I’m Marisa and this is Leah,” Marisa replied, “and I guess that depends on whether you’re Abigail White Horse.”

  “I am, though most people just call me Aggie.” She glanced at Leah and added, “Just push them away if they’re bothering you.”